LONGMONT -- For about the last month, Longmont's campaign trail has been underwater.

Since the St. Vrain River and Left Hand Creek flooded on Sept. 12, both Mayor Dennis Coombs and his challenger, former Mayor Bryan Baum, have found a lot more to keep them busy than yard signs and rallies. For Coombs, the schedule now includes regular meetings with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to arrange critical aid and repairs for the city, while quite a bit of Baum's time has been spent supporting his wife's effort, the Great Colorado Flood Relief Project.

"I didn't even go to my own campaign meetings for two weeks because I was too busy being a mayor," Coombs said.

Coombs
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"Rightfully so," Baum agreed, as he spoke of the shift away from politics for a while. "It's not something we've all focused on."

But normal life has to go on, and that includes the normal life of a re-election campaign that looks oddly familiar. Two years ago, it was Baum who was the incumbent, Coombs the challenger. In a rough year for sitting City Council members -- three of four incumbents were defeated -- Coombs scrapped his way to the top, winning the mayor's gavel in a close race that didn't see a concession until three days after Election Day.

From Coombs' view, the change has been a dramatic one, ending an era of visible clashes between factions in the council.

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The city has even rebuilt ties with the Boulder County Board of County Commissioners, he said, which has proved vital in flood recovery.

"I've proven I'm a team builder," he said. "I think the whole environment of collaboration and teamwork is vastly different. The atmosphere has a positive vibe to it now at City Council meetings; we don't have any negative energy."

But to Baum, the landscape doesn't look so different.

Baum
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Many of the issues from his day are still on the table, he noted: collisions over fracking that have now moved to the courtroom, a FasTracks rail system that has yet to make it near Longmont, challenges in developing Twin Peaks Mall. And most of all, he said, a city that keeps winding up in litigation, most recently on the mall and on oil and gas issues.

"It was well known when I was mayor that I inherited seven major lawsuits, and together with council and staff, we were able to settle those lawsuits," Baum said. "There's something we're inherently doing wrong to end up in court all the time. We're not playing well with others."

Coombs

For Coombs, the condemnation fight against Dillard's was regrettable but unavoidable. The store simply didn't leave Longmont any options for the mall's redevelopment, he said.

"When they rejected an offer to give the mall a trial run for two years at no risk, I knew they didn't really want to stay in Longmont," Coombs said. "It made it easier in my mind to stick with the eminent domain decision. If we didn't, we would have lost our anchor stores and the whole (Twin Peaks Mall) project would have collapsed."

At present, Sam's Club, Whole Foods and a new United Artists movie theater have committed to the new mall, with owner NewMark Merrill Mountain States working to line up other vendors for an early 2015 opening.

In another spotlight legal battle, the city has been sued by the state over its new oil and gas regulations adopted in July 2012 and by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association over its citizen-adopted ban of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Of the two, Coombs said, the regulations lawsuit is the most winnable, and something of an insurance policy.

"I'm not 100 percent sure our charter amendment lawsuit is 100 percent defensible in the long run," he said of the fracking ban's chances. "If we give up the regs (to settle with the state) and then lose the ban, we lose everything."

But there are issues beyond drilling and mall-building. One that needs to come back to the spotlight before long, Coombs said, is affordable housing. Under Baum, the city dropped a requirement that developers either set aside 10 percent of their units as "affordable" or pay the equivalent into a city fund; a city-appointed task force has laid out several options for a successor policy, but nothing has been taken up yet.

"Part of the problem is we need to increase our housing stock and especially our rental housing stock across the board," Coombs said. "There's people who are ready to move into mid-level housing, but there's nowhere for them to move to."

Attracting and keeping businesses remains a strong focus as well, and sometimes a challenging one. Coombs noted that the city made an all-out effort to keep the headquarters of DigitalGlobe in Longmont (the details of Longmont's offer have never been publicly released). While the headquarters still moved to Broomfield -- a shorter commute for most of the company's high-level executives -- Coombs said the city's push managed to keep 350 jobs in town.

"We didn't lose them lock, stock and barrel," he said. "You would have had to pick up the city of Longmont and move it 20 miles south. At the end of the day, that's the only thing that would have kept the company here. Not even my opponent has that kind of power."

Baum

Bring up Twin Peaks Mall, and Baum shakes his head. An issue between the mall owner and Dillard's should never have brought the city into court, he said.

"When I left, Dillard's was definitely a player, no matter who built the mall," Baum said. "They were in the game until March. ... But when you put your destiny in the hands of the court, you lose control of your destiny."

Both Dillard's and the mall owner acknowledged in early April that negotiations had reached a standstill. At that point, the city authorized the beginning of the eminent domain process, including a month-long negotiation period between the store and the Longmont Urban Renewal Authority, followed by a condemnation suit in May.

"Honestly, the reason the city's involved is the citizens want a mall," Baum said. "I think they're looking for the city to facilitate that. But we don't need to facilitate it by being in court."

The fracking lawsuit does need to be defended, he said, because it's now part of the city charter and "the will of the people." He's less sure about the regulations, though. Baum argued that he didn't consider the new rules necessary because the drillers would have been willing to work with the city "on almost every issue."

"I spent a year and a half working with these people when I was mayor," he said. "It's not something that just came up. ... To change the regs, I didn't think was necessary. The council, in its wisdom, thought it was."

Those new rules included a restriction against drilling in residential areas and were approved at the same time as an agreement with TOP Operating -- the city's most significant oil and gas operator -- that established several pre-conditions for drilling, including an increased setback distance between wells and homes citywide. Those conditions have largely been rendered moot by Longmont's fracking ban.

Baum said he also wants to see the city and schools give more attention to the drug and alcohol problem among Longmont's youths. The intervention program Alternatives For Youth has that charge, he said, but there needs to be still more done.

"You have to acknowledge there's a problem, for one -- it's kind of like a 12-step process," he said. "The only way you know about it is if you ask questions to the kids."

The city also needs to keep pushing on FasTracks, Baum said, noting that during his own term, the city was able to get the Regional Transportation District to commit to a $17 million bus and train station in Longmont. (The station is still projected to be built by the end of 2015, but the start of construction was delayed while RTD studied an alternative rail route to Longmont.)

"Where is that?" he asked, referring to the station. "It's one of those things that all cities fight with -- the follow-through when administrations change."

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